It's not quite shooting yourself in the foot, perhaps; but Bradford has stubbed its toe badly by holding back an expert appendix to Lord Ouseley's recent report on the city's troubled race relations.

The document, which surfaced in public only today - two months after the main report was launched at Bradford City's football ground - would have enriched the debate at that crucial time, when everyone including the Government was focussed on Bradford.

The world has moved on since and other issues, inevitably, are now engaging Whitehall. The risk is that the appendix's cool dissection of how things have gone awry, commissioned by Ouseley from Bradford's former principal race relations officer Graham Mahony, will be given a glance and then forgotten.

It makes two fundamental points: that successive councils (and other local authorities in health, policing and related matters) have been too scared to face up to ethnic minority groups when they were clearly heading in a direction at odds with the city as a whole.

In Mahony's words: "They have never reached the stage where they can say to any section of the black and Asian community: 'Sorry, I disagree, I think you are wrong', or 'It is your responsibility to do something about this'."

Secondly, it warns of an unofficial alliance between some Muslim elders and a minority of their community's young men which is discouraging the usual, gradual integration experienced by previous immigrants (of whom Bradford has had many, to its lasting advantage).

The elders are said to rein in their authority to denounce gang crime, including drug-dealing, so long as the lawless youths commit themselves to Islam, avoid alcohol and accept arranged marriages. All this is easier if areas are "colonised" and self-segregated - precisely what Lord Ouseley's report described as happening.

The motive for what Mahony calls "adopting the ostrich position" to evidence about such ethnic minority attitudes has not been all bad. In part it stems from an awareness of the routine racism which assaults every brown or black face in Bradford every day.

In those terms, the appendix is indeed unappetising material. But, like Anne Cryer MP's recent analysis of the brake which arranged brides from Pakistan also put on integration, fluency in English and educational success, it is essential to realistic discussion.

Its publication has come just in time (as its leaker intended) to keep the ostriches out of today's meeting of Bradford council's executive, which will discuss Ouseley publicly for the first time.